November 30, 2008

What does CPM stand for?

CPM is a fairly stan­dard unit of mea­sure in the online adver­tis­ing business.

It stands for Cost per thou­sand (the M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). What it’s mea­sur­ing is the cost per thou­sand ad impres­sions.

Take heisel.org for exam­ple. For the month of Novem­ber I had a little more than 1,000 page views. If I sold ads, and if I sold them at a $5 CPM, then I’d have roughly $5 in rev­enue for the month.

A simple number that belies even more to talk about, but I’ve got a tree to dec­o­rate, so that’s all for tonight.

Filed under: Business,Journalism,Technology

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  • http://heisel.org/blog/2008/11/29/ad-impressions/ heisel.org > What is an ad impression

    [...] per page view. Why would a site put mul­ti­ple ad units on a page? It’s all about CPM, but we’ll tackle that one another [...]